“A Country Doctor” was initially published in its original German in Franz Kafka’s collection of stories Ein Landartz: Kleine Erzählungen in 1919. An English translation first appeared in the 1945 in the volume The Country Doctor: A Collection of Fourteen Stories.
At the outset, the narrative seems to be every bit as conventional and mundane as its title might imply: a doctor in a rural area must make his way through a blizzard to attend to a young man nearing death. As the story unfolds, however, certain details endow the narrative with an eerie sense of unreality. For instance, horses seem to appear from nowhere. The young man the doctor is called to treat suffers from a bizarre wound made all the stranger by the infestation of worms. Finally, the country folk set upon the doctor and strip him of his clothing, laying him next to the patient's wound. These elements create a surrealist atmosphere to the story, not unlike that of Kafka's most famous work The Metamorphosis, when a salesman wakes up one morning to discover he has transformed into a giant insect.
Because of its digression from logic and reality, critics have long puzzled over the meaning of "A Country Doctor." While some have attempted to read the entire story as an allegory for erotic desire, most agree that the story should be read as a dramatization of a dream-like state. As such, many have argued that "A Country Doctor" should be analyzed using psychoanalytic theory, which focuses on the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind.
